There are 12 more deaths of people with Covid-19 and 3387 new community cases, the Ministry of Health says.
Photo: 123rf.com
In its daily update, the ministry said there were 536 people in hospital with the virus, including 13 in intensive care or a high dependency unit.
That compared with 557 people in hospital, including 15 in ICU announced at the update yesterday.
The seven-day rolling average of hospitalisations is 570 - last Monday it was 660.
On the deaths being reported today, two were from the Auckland region, three were from Waikato, two were from MidCentral, one was from Whanganui, three were from Canterbury, one was from Southern.
Three were in their 60s, one was in their 70s, six were in their 80s and two were aged over 90. Of these people, four were women and eight were men.
There are now a total of 1750 deaths confirmed as attributable to Covid-19, either as the underlying cause of death or as a contributing factor.
In the past seven days there have been an average of 14 deaths confirmed each day as being attributable to Covid-19, the ministry said.
There were also 171 new Covid-19 cases at the border.
The seven-day rolling average of community case numbers today is 4230 - last Monday it was 5288.
The number of community cases yesterday at 2618 was the lowest number since 21 February, when the first Omicron surge began to hit.
University of Auckland computational biologist David Welch told Morning Report that wastewater sampling, the testing of groups of workers and daily case numbers all confirmed a consistent downwards trend.
However, the number of people with Covid-19 requiring hospital treatment was still "elevated" and sitting at similar levels to mid-June while the number of deaths was also still quite high.
A lot of that came down to a much older age-group being infected, Welch said.